This specification generally relates to ranking users, and/or particular items of digital content distributed by users in social networking services.
Internet-based social networking services provide a digital medium for users to interact with one another and to share information. For example, users are able to distribute digital content (e.g., posts including textual comments, digital images, digital videos, digital audio, hyperlinks to network-accessible documents, etc.) to other users that they might be connected to within the social networking service. Digital content that is distributed to a user can be displayed to the user automatically in a content stream in a home (or “stream”) page, and/or in response to a user query in a search results page.